


Hold the Line (As Dreamers Do)

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Aliens, Alpha Timeline, Business, Canonical Character Death, Disney References, Dysfunctional Relationships, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Pre-Sburb/Sgrub, Remix, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 15:19:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7623832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1994: The Betty Crocker conglomerate invites Dr. Jade English, celebrated astrophysicist and CEO of Skaianet Technologies, to teach one year of classes at their first foray into private education, Marjorie Husted University in Houston, Texas.</p><p>Jade says yes.</p><p>Meanwhile, the Condesce is staging a corporate takeover of Disney.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold the Line (As Dreamers Do)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dashery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashery/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Hold the Line](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1371097) by [dashery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashery/pseuds/dashery). 



> I am not entirely sure where this came from, but I hope it worked out all right.

**+April 1994+**

You send the invitation as a joke, a little present to yourself to celebrate offing Frank Wells and creating a chance for Crockercorp to swallow the Walt Disney Company in the resulting chaos.

Dear daughter, leave your industrious peons to their own devices, walk willingly into my claws, and spend a year under one of my many roofs where I can watch you every hour of the night and day and learn the strengths and weaknesses you've developed since you ran away. In return, you can teach relatively useless science to idiot monkeys and decide whether it's more dangerous to let them live in ignorance or tell them who really holds power over their pathetic little planet. If you're _very_ clever, you might even claim enough of my attention to delay my takeover of Disney by a year.

Only a naive twit would bite into that poisoned apple, and you didn't raise your unwanted alien heirs to be fools.

(You apparently did raise yourself to start thinking in alien memes. Glubbin' Walt Disney and his glubbin' insidious animated wiggler tales. The sooner you get that studio under your control and stamp them out, the better.)

The crazy thing is, Jade accepts. One year teaching freshman astronomy in Houston? She is all over that like remoras on a shark.

Well, you think as you recalibrate your plans and order a lot more spyware woven into the fabric of Marjorie Husted University's buildings. At least you won't be bored.

\-----

**+August 1994+**

You keep track of the hardware and software your daughter removes from the computers you so generously provided. The effort distracts her enough that she hasn't noticed that the construction equipment still scattered around the roof of her instruction hall isn't actually construction equipment.

"Should have used a scanner, gill," you mutter to the surveillance video. "Or brought a bunch of chumps along to do your grunt work. You've only got a warm-blood lifespan and you're starting to slip in your old age. You gotta bring some other idiots into your plans pretty soon or there won't be anemoneone left to keep fighting once I krill you."

You know Jade will snag the two remaining players from the previous Sburb session sooner or later -- and if she doesn't manage that on her own within a couple years, you will find a way to make it happen.

(Within a glubbin' _sweep_. Not a couple years. A _sweep_. You refuse to localize even if your planet is gone and nobody has shared your history and language for longer than you like to remember. When you recreate your people, they will learn their own culture, not whatever polluted-slurry version you might fall into if you get careless.)

Your master's plan requires a fixed timeline, and your plan requires playing along with his until you get a matriorb within your grasp. You are not going to let idiot monkeys ruin your chance.

\-----

**+September 1994+**

Jade finds the Knight of Time.

You cross one item off your to-do list and head back into the latest merger meeting with a song in your heart. Michael Eisner thinks he's just stalling for time while he restructures, thinks he can fight you off and then go swallow companies himself (he has his eyes on television, you think, both broadcast and cable networks), but there's only one _real_ shark in this tank. 

Your teeth and ambitions are bared, and Eisner sure as shit ain't prepared.

(Aw, fuck, not another glubbin' earworm. Why can't you remember any Alternian songs anymore? Maybe there are some in your ship's records, assuming those sectors didn't get corrupted when the Helmsman died, or during your long, starving flight back to that farce with Damara. You spent those sweeps keeping one step ahead of entropy and the vast, howling vacuum of space that wanted to swallow you whole, without time for anything besides work and sleep, but _somebody_ in the crew must have kept entertainment files.)

\-----

**+November 1994+**

There isn't any real point sending drones after Jade. She could shout about aliens from the rooftops on a megaphone and it wouldn't do one blind bit of good. Fuck, she could hijack every broadcast frequency on the planet to carry her warnings and 99.99% of the world would laugh, before suing her on about a hundred pretexts. You're in too deep and these stupid monkeys are just as willfully blind and easily manipulated as your own people were.

(Are. _Will be_.)

But you can't have an heiress get soft -- it reflects badly on you, makes you look like a sucker who can only take down weaklings instead of the baddest fish in the sea -- and if you break your pattern she might get suspicious of the wrong things too soon.

Also shit's hilarious to watch.

Jade shoots as well as ever (good girl, you think, as you smile down at the monitor), the Knight pins a drone to a wall by glubbin' _accident_ , and then, wonder of wonders, the Seer of Light shows up and starts fritzing your spycams to useless static. Huh. So that's why you've had such a hard time getting clear shots of her, even from the Medium where the normal rules of time and space don't apply.

Jade hauls the Knight off to her house, which she's warded against your sight in a way she can't manage in the public space of the university. The Seer joins them a little bit later and even your perimeter surveillance starts glitching. You have no way to know what they're talking about in there.

When they come out, though, they're clearly all three in cahoots. Jade told them about you. They believed her. They didn't run away.

Good.

You cross another item off your list.

Then you get back to plotting how best to suborn Jeffrey Katzenberg. He wants to run Disney. Eisner wants him gone, but doesn't want to force the issue with you breathing down his neck. You can work with that.

\-----

**+February 1995+**

Jade is being suspiciously quiet.

Also, you are bored. Corporate takeovers, like any invasion, are only exciting for brief intervals. The rest of the time it's nothing but logistics and paperwork. You leave your lawyers and assorted company bigwigs to handle whatever roadblocks Eisner's throwing up this week, plaster on a new disguise, and slip away to Houston via Derse.

(Jack Noir is thinking about rebellion again. You remind him who's boss and send him off on a bullshit intelligence mission to LOTAK. If you're lucky, he might manage to suffocate in the lower levels of the tombs.)

Houston reminds you a little of the desert latitudes on Alternia's eastern continent, trapped in the rain shadows of the Seaspine and Scarshred ranges. You visited them a few times in your youth, when you spent a hundred sweeps swimming around the entire world just to see what was there. Damara joined you off and on while you traveled, dropping in from random points on her own convoluted timeline. You think, now, she probably treated those sweeps as a vacation. You didn't get serious about conquering shit and setting up the empire until later, when those asshole landdwellers attacked your home peninsula and brooding caverns, which meant you spent a lot of time goofing around on your own and she didn't have to carry the weight of her reputation.

You're still pissed off she stole her freedom by using you as the murder weapon and wrapped you up in her old chains as the second half of that maneuver. You miss her anyway. It's been a long time since you had anyone to call you by your name.

It's been even longer since you had anyone you could trust.

You made sure Jade and John fell out with each other when they were wigglers, but monkeys are better at building relationships than trolls ever were -- a side-effect of their general toothless nature. John has a son now. He had a wife, too, until you knocked her off. (You will not stand for your descendants, adopted or not, indulging in mammalian reproduction methods. That shit is _filthy_.) Jade was always more careful, didn't form any attachments that offended you enough to strike, but now she has the Seer and the Knight.

You can't quite figure out which of them she's red for and which pale. It doesn't even matter, really, since she's too old for non-ectobiological reproduction. You're just annoyed at not knowing.

You watch the three former players laugh at a back corner table in a smoky bar. The lighting is too poor for monkey eyes to see details at any distance, but your people evolved under moonlight rather than the glare of a poisonous sun. You watch the Seer steal fried potato sticks from Jade's plate, watch Jade feed a breaded chicken strip to the Knight, watch the Knight blush. That's red, you decide. And the Seer is pale for both the others, yet another display of that casual promiscuity this species not only allows but celebrates.

That is one of the first things you're going to stomp out once you have Disney firmly in your grip. They can make movies about conquest and surrender instead. Maybe something based on your life -- an empress is better than a princess any day. A princess is only an heiress, only a maybe. An empress is an inevitability.

You set your half-drunk Tab on the bar (a little taste of home) and leave without tipping.

\-----

**+April 1995+**

Katzenberg ousts Eisner and agrees to acquisition rather than merger. Disney is yours. The financial papers bubble with disbelief and Crockercorp's stock rises 15% in a single week.

You send Jade another drone for her birthday. It would be a shame if she thought you'd forgotten her.

She sends you back its head, wrapped in rainbow paper and tied with a cheerful green ribbon.

You're so proud of her.

\-----

**+May 1995+**

Jade finally catches on about the construction equipment. It took her glubbin' forever and she needed a hint -- she's definitely slowing down in her old age -- but she got there in the end. Good girl.

You flip a coin to decide what to do about your university president. On the one hand, he spilled the beans. On the other hand, you're pretty sure he's never going to make an active move against you and you needed Jade to find the transportalizers eventually. It lands heads up. He's safe from you, for now.

You think about going to Derse to confront Jade directly, but really, what would be the point? You know exactly when and where you'll kill her, and you can't afford to deviate from your master's timeline. Not yet.

(Besides, she's going to pull a _beautiful_ fast one on Jack Noir, and it'd be a glubbin' shame if you distracted him so he goes straight to anger instead of letting you record the best blackmail ever when he finds his fourth wall missing.)

You probably ought to clean up the transportalizer so Jade can't come back the way she left. She needs to find Hellmurder Island instead, and the Seer and the Knight can't be allowed to follow her into the Medium. There's too much chance the three of them together would derail your master's timeline, and then it's curtains for you all.

You send a couple drones to blow shit up. No need to be subtle anymore.

Then you settle down to planning what kind of subliminal messages to stick into every one of Disney's home video releases, because you can't just cut the flow without laying some groundwork first. The stories are still sickening, but the younger you get the monkeys listening to you, the better, and nobody beats Disney at shaping wiggler brains.

You catch yourself humming a saccharine monkey tune as you work, from the movie about a puppet come to life. More glubbin' earworms. What is it with Disney and earworms?

Well. Your request _is_ pretty extreme, and your heart is definitely in your dream. You've dedicated a thousand sweeps to it, after all. And what's so wrong with wanting freedom for yourself and life for your people? Even Walt Disney himself couldn't argue with that.

Just this once, you don't force yourself to fight the slow infection of alien culture.

_"When you wish upon a star,_  
_Makes no difference who you are_  
_Anything your heart desires_  
_Will come to you..."_

\-----  
\-----  
\-----

**+June 2002+**

You lean against your trident, letting your weight shove the tines a little further between Jade's ribs.

"I'm almost shorey this is the end," you tell her. "I have plans I can't let you derayl, though, and I'll tell you a secret: if you'd won, that would have meant the end of this whole world. Lord English only lets a single timeline survive, and it's the one that leads to his own creation. I'm as stuck as you were. But I tell you what, gill. Once we pass the chokepoint in the timeline, once I krill him and get my world and people back, I'll tell them stories aboat you. You were the best heiress I ever had and you deserve that much."

"When my grandson and his friends kill you," Jade says between bubbling gasps for breath, "they'll tell stories about you too. And you won't be the hero. You'll be the big bad witch, and you'll die alone just like you lived."

You smile down at her. "Nah. You know something aboat your grandson? He's in love with movies. Any movie. Every movie. And you know who owns all of Hollywood these days? _Me_. Maybe I can't get him dirayctly, not like I can get my new heiress, but the thing aboat stories is they put frames on what you think is posshellible. You shoald have paid more attention to my company back in '94 instead of your shenanigans in Texas."

You think she might try to say something more, but her lungs are filled with blood now and she has no air to shape and carry her words.

"You fought well, Jade Crocker English. Now die."

You pull your trident from your daughter's chest and leave her corpse to the jungle.

Her blood will water the plants, the plants will feed the lusii you've seeded on this island, and eventually the lusii will raise a new generation of your people. The circle of life, you think. It ruled her. It ruled your people. One night, you'll make sure it rules your master, too, and then Alternia will rise again, free from his hidden tyranny and free from the contamination this stupid monkey planet and its stupid monkey people have spread over the surviving wigglers in the game.

You are the last true troll in this universe or any other, and you will hold the line.

**Author's Note:**

> Frank Wells really was the president of the Walt Disney Company, and really did die in April 1994; however, it was a helicopter crash rather than assassination by a disguised alien overlord. _The Lion King_ had its theatrical release in June 1994, so it is period accurate for the Condesce to mangle lyrics from that film. Also, in our world Jeffrey Katzenberg was forced to resign in October 1994 rather than ousting Eisner.
> 
> If you are interested, I rambled some more about this remix [here on my journal](http://edenfalling.dreamwidth.org/941683.html).


End file.
